Effects of tropical forest fragmentation on aerial insectivorous bats in a land-bridge island system.

By Sergio Estrada‐Villegas, Christoph F. J. Meyer, E. Kalko. 2010

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Habitat fragmentation causes drastic changes in the biota and it is crucial to understand these modifications to mitigate its consequences. While studies on Neotropical bats have mainly targeted phyllostomid bats, impacts of fragmentation on the equally important aerial insectivores remain largely unexplored. We studied species richness, composition, count abundance and feeding activity of aerial insectivorous bats in a system of land-bridge islands in Panama with acoustic sampling. We predicted negative effects of fragmentation on forest species while bats foraging in open space should remain essentially unaffected. Rarefaction analyses indicated higher species richness for islands than mainland sites. For forest species, multivariate analyses suggested compositional differences between sites due to effects of isolation, area and vegetation structure. Contrary to our expectations, count abundance of forest species was similar across site categories. Feeding activity, however, was curtailed on far islands compared to near islands. As expected, bats hunting in open space did not reveal negative responses to fragmentation. Interestingly, they even displayed higher abundance counts on far and small islands. On the species level, two forest bats responded negatively to size reduction or site isolation, respectively, while a forest bat and a bat hunting in open space were more abundant on islands, irrespectively of island isolation or size. Our findings suggest that small forest remnants are of considerable conservation value as many aerial insectivores intensively use them. Hence high conservation priority should be given to retain or re-establish a high degree of forest integrity and low levels of isolation.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/764b80d854ee390bc155be7682eea9cc37ce7ec2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. Kirsten Jung
2. C. Threlfall
3. E. Kalko
4. Christoph F. J. Meyer
5. Paulo E. D. Bobrowiec

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Kirsten Jung
2. C. Threlfall
3. E. Kalko
4. Christoph F. J. Meyer
5. Paulo E. D. Bobrowiec

In Paleontology

1. Kirsten Jung
2. E. Kalko

Citations in the corpus

• Urbanisation and Its Effects on Bats—A Global Meta-Analysis (2016, background): “Persistence of bats in fragmented landscapes has been associated with edge tolerance and mobility in phyllostomids (Meyer and Kalko 2008), and the predominant use of open space as foraging habitat for aerial insectivorous bats (Estrada-Villegas et al. 2010).”
• Adaptability and vulnerability of high flying Neotropical aerial insectivorous bats to urbanization (2011, background): “…Neotropical aerial insectivorous bats in the large urban environment of Mexico City (Avila-Flores & Fenton, 2005) and in fragmented landscapes in Panama (Estrada-Villegas et al., 2010), where overall species richness decreased and dominance of a few species increased with increasing human impact.”